Often, the first think people shoot at you when at ad-contest is finished is the peculiar question “Did you win?”. And whilst it is questionable whether winning is key to a competition, it sort of makes the rest look less valuable. Besides, it kinda leaves a bad taste in your mouth to say you didn’t […]

Sunday, the 19th of June, 2011: The Cannes Film Festival was over. The celebrities where flown back to Beverly Hills. Their trash was removed, the red carpet was vacuumed and the champagne glasses where cleaned. It was time, for the Advertising Festival. Roughly 9000 people with jobs in advertising came to Cannes and collected their […]

Hans van Dijk started his career in 1976 at Ogilvy & Mather in Amsterdam, to join Kuiper & Schouten in 1985. He (and others) started Low Digital in 1997 and in 2001 the Amsterdam based Skipintro, where he still works as CD today. Hans did heaps of work in the Netherlands, making him one of […]

Diane Costa has over fourteen years of experience in advertising & branding of all types of business. She’s owner and MD at Marketing Mechanics in Sydney, Australia and worked with blue-chip companies like Vodafone, McDonald’s and Cadbury. On top of that, she’s an associate member of the Australian Marketing Institute and owns an internet store […]

Osama bin Laden, also known as Usama bin Laden, Usama bin Ladin, Ussamah Bin Ladin and Oussama Ben Laden, is no more. But like many notorious people, OBL was used in many ads and will probably continue to do so. He often functions as a metaphor for something that’s evil or someone that’s incredibly hard […]

He’s a very talented illustrator with great passion for what he does. Peterson Joseph, also known as ‘Leaky Penny’, was born and raised in Montreal, Canada and went to study Illustration and Design at Dawson College there. He now lives in Toronto, where makes fantastic energetic illustrations, inspired by music such as jazz and hip […]

I suppose April 2 is a good day to look back on the ‘not-so-serious’ announcements made yesterday, although most of them where made pretty seriously. ` LinkedIn The business-oriented social networking site filled the usual ‘People You May Know’ with some rather unusual names. Playmobile Apple Store This might actually have a chance of succeeding, […]

Listening to the old internet dail-up sound definitely takes me back to a time, not so long ago (10 years?) where I had to ask my parents every time if I could go on the internet. The computer would use the telephone line, so we couldn’t receive any phonecalls (and to be honest, I for one […]

Meet Luke Sullivan. Ad geek and an award-winning copywriter. Luke has been writing since about 6th grade and worked for agencies like Fallon McElligott and The Martin Agency. He is now CD at GSDM in ‘good ol’ Austin’. He wrote the bestselling advertising guide ‘Hey Whipple, Squeeze This’ back in 1998, a book now in third […]

Maybe I’m just being grumpy here but I can use a good rant since I’m getting really really tired from seeing the same faded faux Polaroid aesthetics all over again. All I see is old timey photoshopped images. I can understand people are trying to be cute but just because it looks ‘vintage’ and ‘antique’ […]

Most ideas jump into our brains at unexpected times, at unexpected places. (Having dinner at 6′ is an idea, and it’s one that occurs at an expected time and expected place but that’s not the kind of idea I mean. I’m talking big, honkin’ ideas.) The point is, creative ideas can’t be forced out (or […]

Sharp is his pencil and modest are his words: ‘I don’t brag unless it’s mandatory.’ With his head in the clouds, Chandra Wijaya Tan is about to graduate in Advertising at the London School of Public Relations in Jakarta, Indonesia. He has work experience at Y&R Jakarta and does freelancing (although he says this is […]